In the shoot-'em-up video game "Call of Duty: Black Ops," the player takes on the identity of a Cold War foot soldier who aims an array of submachine guns, assault rifles and grenades at whoever pops up onscreen.
It's bloody, no question, and it's a big hit with Jill Huston's 15-year-old son, Reed. "He's obsessed with it," said Huston, of Urbandale. He slips on the Xbox headset, grabs a controller and plays a multiplayer version with his friends. "They'll call me down and say, 'Hey, Mom, watch this,' " she said. "But it can be kind of hard to watch. You know how the graphics are on video games now. It's not Pac-Man."
And now those games - no matter how violent - are no longer off-limits to Reed and his friends. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court struck down California's ban on selling or renting to minors video games that depict "killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being." The justices conceded that the government has the power to protect children from harm, but "that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed."
The 7-2 opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia went on to point out that kids have been exposed to gruesome images for years. "Grimm's Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed," he wrote, noting that California's law was the latest in a long series of attempts to censor violent entertainment for minors. "Cinderella's evil stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by doves, and Hansel and Gretel (children!) kill their captor by baking her in an oven."
But the court's decision doesn't sit well with those who supported similar restrictions in Iowa, where a 2006 bill like the California law failed to gain enough support at the statehouse. Carmen Lampe Zeitler, the executive director of Children and Family Urban Ministries in Des Moines thinks the justices got it wrong.
"Clearly, the research shows that horrific violence of some video games does damage to children. I am not a scientist or researcher, but common sense and some experience with children would bear that out," she wrote in an email.
"Children are vulnerable, at the very least, to the visual impact of violence in movies and video games. They report that they cannot get certain images out of their heads. Sometimes those images keep them from getting sleep, from being able to concentrate - which has an impact on their performance at school, behavior and relationships.
"It seems to me the California law was attempting to restrict access to the violence of video by those under 18, not to restrict the making of the videos (which I am sure is making someone, a lot of someones, a lot of money)," she wrote.
Those someones, in fact, generated $25 billion last year in the video-game industry, which hailed the court's ruling as a green light for creative freedom.
As the audience of more than 100 million gamers nationwide has aged - the age of the average player is 37, and nearly a third of players are over 50 - the industry has adjusted its products accordingly.
The 1992 hit "Mortal Kombat" seems almost quaint compared to recent games like the free-wheeling "Grand Theft Auto" series, "Bulletstorm" and "Postal 2," which figured prominently into the arguments before the court. The game's scoring system keeps track, in gallons, of how much a player urinates on the corpses of victims, along with stats like "number of people murdered," "people roasted" and "heads exploded by shotgun."
Iowa State University psychologists Douglas Gentile and Craig Anderson have spent more than a decade studying the connections between media violence and aggressive behavior, and they co-wrote a brief for the recent Supreme Court case on behalf of the scientific community. Their conclusion: "Yes, violent video games do have an affect on players, in general, and children, in particular," Gentile said.
The effects aren't alwasy obvious.
"The people who don't like to believe the science, they make it extreme," he said. "But we're talking about low-level aggression."
A child who plays violent video games probably won't go out and commit murder, he said, but he or she may be more likely to react aggressively, say, after getting pushed at school.
Ten years ago, Gentile and Anderson's research helped nudge the issue of media violence into the national spotlight. There were even Senate hearings - two weeks before the 9/11 attacks pushed them aside.
Gentile hopes the rekindled debate shifts away from restricting access and toward equipping parents with better information. Instead of industry-specific ratings systems - there are separate groups that rate movies, TV, video games and more - he'd like to see a single group rate all forms of media.
"Parents really want ratings (for video games), but they don't use them because they don't think they're accurate," he said.
He also suggests training pediatricians to know what questions to ask when parents bring in their kids with behavior problems and to offer media-related guidelines. He'd even like to see media-consumption tips folded into classes for new parents, when they're most receptive to advice.
"There's been a tremendous failure of imagination about what else we could be doing," he said. "Anything we can do to help parents is going to be more effective than some kind of law that focuses on restricting access. When parents set limits, that's a powerful protective force."
Source: [http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20110703/LIFE/107030304/-1/GALLERY_ARRAY/Ruling-violent-content-draws-fire]
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